


they abide. and they endure.

by cormac



Category: Joker (2019), Taxi Driver (1976)
Genre: Angst and Tragedy, Diary/Journal, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Platonic Male/Male Relationships, Religious Guilt, Running Away, Slow Build, Trauma, Trust Issues, allusions to other movies, anger issues
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-23
Updated: 2020-10-23
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:01:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27161507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cormac/pseuds/cormac
Summary: "Where are we going?""Out of here. Far away from here. Doesn't matter.""Okay. Okay.""Comedian in New York, comedian in Arkansas. Doesn't matter. Cab driver in New York, cab driver in Arkansas—""—Doesn't matter."Travis smiles.
Relationships: Travis Bickle/Arthur Fleck
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	they abide. and they endure.

**Author's Note:**

> I've wanted to write a Taxi Driver fic for a long time but just got around to doing it, so that's fun!
> 
> If you are interested, the movie that Travis references is real, and you can find an actual synopsis of it here: [The Night of the Hunter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_of_the_Hunter_\(film\)). It's a wonderful movie and I highly encourage you go to watch it if you haven't already.
> 
> Thank you for reading, criticisms are always welcome!

A car screams by him, close enough to take a patch of his jacket with it, a square of khaki sleeve fabric gone, now flapping wildly on the rearview mirror of some bastard's Mercedes. Saying his heart stopped would be an understatement. It was in fact beating so fast that it appeared to be doing nothing at all. 

In between heavy breaths that betray his panic, he manages to choke out: "Arthur. Fuck. You okay?"

The man with the ruined jacket is called Travis Bickle. The man beside him, Arthur Fleck. He is shaking and pale like laminated paper, shell-shocked. 

"FUCKING BASTARD!" Travis yells, waving a fist at the driver, but he is long gone into the urban forest. He takes a breath, calms down, but the adrenaline swirls around in his system like so much airplane turbulence.

"We were on the damned sidewalk. It's ok, Arthur. He wasn't chasing us after all."

Arthur doesn't respond. Travis reaches out, barely touching his ear.

"Arthur, you hear me? Bastard's just late to work. Almost killed me, y'saw that?"

They weren't supposed to be alive. Travis had been woken up roughly in the middle of the night and Arthur could only say, "They're here, they're here, they're here." That had been a few days ago. More than one hundred hours of being chased, of constantly looking over your shoulder. Travis had heard of scientists looking at the effects of stress on rats. He'd heard that their hair started to fall out, that they started to bite themselves, eat themselves, eat each other ... he didn't want to know how long it took for them to reach that point. The last stage, of course, was death.

The memory chills him as he looks at Arthur, more or less catatonic, physically there but mentally trawling in the wasteland inside of his head. He takes his hand. Tonight would be the night they would finally take that goddamned train out of here, out of this city that wanted to swallow them whole. Anything, anywhere, appealed to him more than languishing in the stomach acid of this failing empire. He had never gotten why fruit would rot from the inside out, but now he understood. He looked at the deceptive-red skin of an apple, full of cloying and fake luster, then to the reflective faces of the skyscrapers and buildings, and saw no difference.

It had always been like this. It would always be like this.

Usually they walked through the shaded streets on the outskirts. They were still saturated with neon and halogen lamps that flashed red, green, yellow, the bright facade of a cinema where black letters proclaimed boldly: NIGHT OF THE HUNTER. The first time they'd watched it, Arthur had been transfixed by the song that the preacher hummed. _Leaning on the Everlasting Arms_. Travis only knew this because his parents had taken him to church when he was very young. He had been baptized. His father would always joke that if the priest were to put the wafer in his mouth, the body of Christ, it would burst into flame. 

_What a fellowship, what a joy divine,_

Arthur wanted to know about Jesus. How Travis got baptized. All the sermons he listened to, and the one time he did Reconciliation. He explains to him that he and a priest had to get into this very small booth, and a wall would separate them. He'd talk to the priest, and the priest would talk to me, through slits in the wall which were carved so that the priest could see him, but he couldn't see the priest. There was a velvet curtain. The first question Father would ask was: _When was the last time you've sinned?_

"Well, when was it?"

"I don't know. I might be lying to you, in which case I've just sinned right now."

A beatific smile grows on Arthur's face; Travis is scared that the corners of his mouth will wrap all the way around his head and end up splitting it into two. "Why do you have to do Reconciliation?"

"You get ... absolved. Forgiven. Cleansed."

"Sounds nice."

"Yeah."

"Could you do that for me?"

"I ain't a priest, Art. Not ordained, or whatever." A pause. "Sorry."

"S'alright."

Travis squirms for a moment, wraps his long fingers around a cast iron lamp pole, careful to avoid the stickers, the razors, the stray hypodermic needles full of hepatitis and HIV. He wondered if Arthur had grown up with any kind of God at all. Travis wasn't sure if he believed in a God anymore, but if there was one out there, He was one selfish bastard. The sunlight casts deep shadows on Arthur's face, sporadic French-curve shadows that led into one another, escaping into black hollows. 

_Leaning on the everlasting arms;_

"I thought a lot about this," he begins. Arthur looks up, confused. "We should take the train out of here. Too dangerous here."

Arthur nods. 

"We can't keep going on like this, I mean."

"Where are we going?"

"Out of here. Far away from here. Doesn't matter."

"Okay. Okay."

"Comedian in New York, comedian in Arkansas. Doesn't matter. Cab driver in New York, cab driver in Arkansas—"

"—Doesn't matter."

Travis smiles. 

_What a blessedness, what a peace is mine,_

The earth groans beneath him. It has done this maybe once, twice, in the past hour. It brings with it a flock of loose newspapers which splay out into the air, caught by the rushing wind. Arthur and Travis stand at the mouth of the metro station. 

It is late. They are hunched over, their eyes wide and haunted like a refugee's. They seem to be carrying immense burdens, trailing suitcases and burlap bags behind them like a cynical bridal chain, but they only have nothing between them except for their coats. New York at night is familiar to both of them and they look onward into the jungle of metal girders and flickering, oily light, glass somewhere far above that would let the moonlight through. Arthur is afraid of the way the glass might fall. No one would see it in the dark, but they would hear it -- if a ceiling fell in NYC, crushing two of its homeless, well, did anyone really die at all?

In the station entrance, which is built as a massive brick archway where nocturnal commuters walk through, Travis whispers something to Arthur, who shakes his head. Travis takes out a cigarette pack from a pocket, lights it with steady hands. Smoke rises in puffs. Soon, it would be dawn, and then morning. Soon, they would have to move away from the oncoming wave of VIP faces obscured with whichever sunglasses that were popular at the time, usually dressed in navy or khaki or if you were a woman, a minimal black dress ... all they could do was people-watch. Travis thought he was well on his way to the unabridged encyclopedia of New Yorkers.

For now, though, the underbelly reigned. A prostitute walks by. She looks far too young. Her pimp is trailing her like a wolf. Arthur glances to Travis, whose lip twitches, but he remains quiet. 

"Sure we're safe here?" Arthur asks, his voice rough from the cold in his lungs.

"Sure, Art. Sure we are."

"How bout that guy? That guy over there?"

"What about him?"

"He's been watching us."

Travis squints to where Arthur is pointing with a trembling hand. The sky has lightened a shade, and in the blue dark, he sees a man dressed smartly, well-tailored suit and a matching hat. Something about him screams danger, but all of those Wall Street brokers did. Still, Arthur won't calm down. 

"It's alright, Art." Travis goes to take his arm, so thin in that threadbare maroon-seaweed cardigan, but like clockwork, the stranger's head snaps up. All the years he's lived here, and for what? Has he learned nothing about sharks and how they can smell blood from miles away? Too late. Travis watches the future unfold before his eyes like a fan, not seductive but grim and terrifying, petrifying, like watching a bomb fall, whistling down at terminal velocity to the surface of the Earth where it will eat up all the people and all the ground around it in a hungry holocaust, white-hot eschatology ...

"RUN!" He shouts. The air is leaving his lungs, his vocal cords smart with the effort, but has he really said anything at all? Arthur is a lead weight in his hand. 

"ART, WE HAVE TO RUN!"

His face turns toward him, and Travis dreads the expression he'll see on it, one of accusation, or worse, total resignation. He forces himself to look, _really_ look. Arthur's face, in the end, is unreadable. 

Then they run.

Arthur, who has more or less prowled the alleyways of New York all his life, and Travis, whose job was to know it like the back of his hand, they weave in and out of main streets, their shoes slamming a staccato tempo, _alegro_ and erratic, _taptaptaptaptap_ , the stranger murmuring something into his pager --

"RUN! RUN, GODDAMIT!" Travis's voice.

As if that will make them run any faster.

The ground comes rushing up to meet him with every desperate stride he takes. He feels the impact in his jaws. And still, not enough -- two other strangers join the chase, materializing from the commuting mob like minor deities sent to do the work of some greater being, mouthpieces of a cruel god, the monkey wrench and the baton. The autumn wind stings his face, his eyes are watering. Arthur, silhouetted in the gray dawn light, is blurred to unrecognition. 

They make a sharp turn out into the open, then they turn again. Down they go, half-sliding, half-running down the staircase, leading them deeper, deeper, into the bowels of the Times Square station, plunging into the throngs of commuters and early-bird tourists, but they can't stop, can't catch their breath, they run through platforms after platforms, running into handbags, luggage, children and men and women, further into the labyrinth of human flesh. 

Arthur wheezes, hunches over as if he's been punched. His hand, placed on the wall, is shaking. His breathing is harsh and uneven, dangerously close to being a laugh. So many people, faceless and busy, move around them and through them. Travis feels helpless, sick, like a child. He slumps to the floor along side Arthur, and puts his face in his hands. 

_Leaning on the everlasting arms._

\-- 

Nov. 19 1976

Arthur and I, we were alike. Both angry men. Sick of the world. Angry at whatever injustice. We wanted to make things right. And what had come of it? Gotham City, I'd heard of it before. The titanium rosette of New Jersey. A sister to New York. 

Arthur had beheaded one of the biggest corporate chickens in the nation. A headless chicken can survive for a while, if its brain stem is left intact. I think that's what it's called. They had put it on life-support even even as fires raged and tensions soared higher than ever seen before, straight into stratosphere and beyond. What happened next was this: martial law. Then police. The military. Hundreds, thousands, dead in the streets. Dumped into canals. Across the city, bloody brown water spluttered from the faucets. The smell was unbearable. 

Now the only difference between City and Jersey is the name.

Arthur didn't laugh at that joke. Because everything, all of it, had been for nothing.

Now a new neoliberal golden boy's at the helm of Jersey's beloved Late Night Show. I don't know. Truth was, for every crown jewel they had in the glass casing, there was a line of them behind that velveteen pillow, each one more polished and faceted than the last. Gotham's elite enjoyed their medium-rare steaks in their white-picket fence palaces while the rest of them starved, looking from the outside in. You are what you eat. They didn't even belong to their own city. Nothing makes me sadder. 

Again, the only difference between City and Jersey ...

I've beheaded my own chicken. But I'm a hero now. I had hoped to die, then, in that red room full of moisture, Iris shriveled up into the corner, her long pale bird-legs tucked in front of her. She was scared; I could smell the fear wafting off of her in viscous, acrid clouds, even through all the blood. I'd wanted to reach out to her, tell her everything was going to be okay. I was dribbling blood, so much blood, down the front of my shirt. I knew that the body could hold ten pints of blood or more, but I'd never known that it was this much. Then the police came in, and I only had the strength to bring a hand up next to my head in the shape of a gun, two pointer fingers as the barrel, and to pull the trigger.

_Pew. Pew. Peeeew._

I had hoped to die then. 

Instead, I woke up.

I still have the letter Iris sent me. I knew that everything that I'd ever done only chipped at the surface of everything venal, everything sinful, everything filthy ... New York City was crisscrossed with so much scar tissue that should've built a city with integrity, of safety and love, real love ... call me naive, but once you serve in Vietnam you begin to see it everywhere. Work isn't a wolf. It won't run away into the forest. Boy, those russkis really know how to make up sayings.

I hear the taxi meter going _tick, tick, tick_. All the time. Then I would think about that movie, _The Night of the Hunter._ I had watched it when I was a little kid. The pastor in it, Reverend Powell, I think his name was, had tattoos on his fingers: HATE stamped on one hand, LOVE on the other. 

Ain't that funny.

But I understand it now. The hate and the love. The world passes through me. I'm invisible— _invisible!_

Sitting in the pew of an empty church one night, I pressed my forehead against my hands and asked God, "Why didn't you let me die?" What I got in response was what I'd been getting my entire life without exception: silence.

The next day, Arthur Fleck shows up at my doormat.

I ain't no philistine. I showed him inside. Arthur was even skinnier then, his hair matted, clothes torn. Filled with an intensity and a ... perverse vitality that threatened to poison the entire room if left unchecked. Electrifying. He'd smelled like ozone. For a while, Arthur had sat on the couch in front of the broken TV. He was looking intently at something which I would find out later on that it'd been a newspaper clipping of my face. A picture of me staring at the camera, my eyes, nose, and mouth reduced to a spray of dark Ben Day dots. Arthur had turned his face to me. His mouth was set in a picture of resolve that belonged in the dictionary. It would be the only time I would ever see it on him. 

"I need your help."


End file.
